Who Reads The kalmstrom.com Blog?

Last week I looked at the statistics for most read blog posts in February, but it is also interesting to see who those readers are. A study of the figures show some expected result but also some nice surprises.

English speaking countries
Visitors from United States and Great Britain dominate among the blog readers every month. This is to be expected, as the blog is written in English and the kalmstrom.com products are popular in these countries. Of course many users want to keep up with the events of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

India and China
To our delight we also see that the kalmstrom.com Blog has many readers in India and China. Both countries are in rapid development, and we are happy to be on the scene in India. We hope to soon have a partner in China also, to take advantage of this huge market and the evident interest in the kalmstrom.com Business Solutions software there.

Europe
After USA, UK, India and China comes a group of countries with approximately the same number of Blog visitors. Here we find for example Sweden and Germany, both with many Members of kalmstrom.com Community. Russia and Ukraine are also included here.

Mac users
The Blog statistics also show the visitors’ operating system, and since kalmstrom.com builds applications for Microsoft Office I was first surprised when I saw that 20 % of the February readers use Macintosh instead. Then I realized that many of them probably use Office for Windows in a virtual machine inside their Mac.

I read an interesting article in Business Insider about this use of Microsoft Office, where Matt Rosoff suggests that Microsoft should build first-class native versions of Office for all popular platforms. We have no objections to that!

Smart phones
The kalmstrom.com Blog looks nice in a smart phone also, but only a few percent read the blog on their mobiles. I assume this figure will rise in the future, but not that much. I still think most will prefer to read the articles on a computer, even if my aim is to make them so interesting that you want to read them as soon as you get a chance ;)

One Year Behind The kalmstrom.com Scene

Some members of the kalmstrom.com team are highly visible – like me! You look at the work of our designers as soon as you visit the kalmstrom.com website or use our products, and you meet other team members in support and sales chats and e-mails.

But there are others in the team whose contributions are equally important, even if they are not as easy for everyone to see and appreciate. In this post I will let kalmstrom.com developer Vijayant Rimza represent those team members.

Two brothers
Vijayant – or Rinku, as we call him – joined the kalmstrom.com team one year ago. He then had a good education but not much experience, so he was willing to start as a trainee. We soon saw his skills and hired him as developer instead. Rinku is the brother of our Lead Developer, but he fully earns his place in the team on his own merits. On the image above our CEO is thanking Rinku for good cooperation, and it is obvious how proud his brother Jayant is feeling.

Silver Certification Test
Rinku was the developer who tested our products with a special tool that Microsoft provides to Partners. The result of these tests, together with our other achievements, made us Microsoft Silver Partners as both Independent Software Vendor and Business Intelligence specialists.

Premium copies
Premium Members of the kalmstrom.com Community get their own copy of the application they use. This copy does not have to be registered, and it has the logotype of the Premium Member organization. Rinku is the developer who is creating these copies, and he also makes sure they are updated when we release a new version of the corresponding standard product.

HelpDesk OSP development
In August kalmstrom.com released version 3 of HelpDesk OSP, the add-on that connects Outlook to SharePoint. Rinku created a significant part of the new version, that had a new design , several new features and a simplified login to the SharePoint site. HelpDesk OSP works with any SharePoint site, and we use it ourselves with our Office 365 SharePoint.

Getting rid of the OWC dependency
Several of our applications require installation of the Office Web Components on at least the administrator machine. As OWC have not been installed automatically since Office 2003, evaluators with Office 2007 and 2010 have to download and install them separately. During the autumn one of Rinku’s tasks has been to handle this problem, and we will see the effects of his work in coming new product versions.

Kanban Task Manager
Right now Rinku is engaged in an exciting new product – the Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. This software will visualize the work with Outlook Tasks and make it easy for a workgroup to work together on projects. As SharePoint will be one of the options for sharing and storage, the members of the group may very well be geographically dispersed.

Vijayant Rimza is ambitious, and in addition to the studies necessary for all team members, to keep up with the latest technologies, he also takes courses in Business Management. It has been a pleasure working with Rinku this past year, and we look forward to a continued good cooperation for years to come!

Google Challenges Dropbox And SkyDrive On Cloud File Sharing and Storage

Last week Wall Street Journal announced that Google will soon release a cloud service for storing and sharing files, similar to the ones already provided by Dropbox and SkyDrive. As the kalmstrom.com team has used Dropbox for file sharing during several years we look forward to the new release with interest. Will Google's G-Drive offer something better?

To store and share files in the cloud
Cloud storage is an alternative to disks, extra hard drives and other medias used for backing up files. Instead of connecting a physical device to your computer and save your files to it, you upload them to a server via the internet. If you give another person access to the folders that contain your files, you can easily share them without having to send them as e-mail attachments or using other more troublesome and insecure ways.

Dropbox or SkyDrive?
When kalmstrom.com Business Solutions looked for a good cloud service for file sharing the most important feature was how quickly files could be transferred from one computer or smartphone to another. We found that Dropbox was superior to Microsoft’s SkyDrive in that respect, so we chose Dropbox, first for our internal files and later also for the setup files of the kalmstrom.com Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint applications.

The kalmstrom.com use of Dropbox
When you download a product from the kalmstrom.com website it is actually not stored there at all. Instead we use a public Dropbox folder, and it has worked just fine. At kalmstrom.com only three people are allowed to upload files to this public folder, so you can feel sure you will get a clean product. But anyone may of course download the files.

Also for the Premium, register free copies of the kalmstrom.com software we use Dropbox. Here there are only a few people with access rights on either side, so the Premium copy is well protected and cannot be used by anyone but a couple of responsible persons in the Premium Member organization.

The kalmstrom.com team makes good use of Dropbox for sharing files within the group. In my PC I have a number of Dropbox subfolders that I share with different team members, and when one of them has dragged a file to the corresponding folder in her/his PC it does not take many seconds before I have it in my own machine and can open it.

The Google challenge
Google already offers several services for storing data in the cloud, so it is a logical step for this giant to take up the fight with Dropbox. It is said that Google will offer 25 GB of storage for free against Dropbox 2GB, but to really compete and make happy users leave Dropbox I think Google has to make their service better than Dropbox also. Microsoft SkyDrive already offers 25 GB, but they are still not as strong on the market as Dropbox is.

Who is the most reliable?
The outcome of the competition is also a matter of confidence. Whom do you want to entrust your valuable files? Lately Google has received some hard criticism for lack of respect for user integrity, a sentiment that Microsoft has encouraged in various ways. Dropbox, on the other hand, has a good reputation for security and protection of data, and I am sure they will do everything to keep this high regard.

The kalmstrom.com team will monitor the development closely, but today we see no reason to leave Dropbox for any other provider of cloud sharing and storage.

The kalmstrom.com VIP Status – What Does It Mean?

The kalmstrom.com SharePoint and Outlook Solutions are licensed with a subscription system, and there are three subscription levels. All three levels include free use of the kalmstrom.com software, support and upgrades, but the Premium Subscription level also includes some other benefits. One of them is called VIP status.

Support priority
The most important part of the VIP status is perhaps the first priority of support cases. We of course try to help all kalmstrom.com Subscribers as soon as possible, but if a Premium Subscriber gets a problem with their kalmstrom.com Solution, the team postpones all other tasks to assist the Premium Subscriber as soon as possible. The support mailbox and the online chat are supervised nearly 24/7 even if the office is not officially open, so we can act very quickly if needed.

“In the event we had problems with TimeCard the people and helpdesk of Kalmstrom did a great job in solving the issue on a very short notice”, says Jeroen Graafland at Hay Group, a long time Premium Subscriber. And he adds: “When we discover a bug this is solved on a very short notice and deployed very easily via the update function of TimeCard.”

Influence on development
Another important factor for the Premium Subscribers is the chance to influence future development. Our CEO Peter makes the final decision, as he is the one who can best judge the paths kalmstrom.com should follow towards the future, but he does his very best to include the requests from Premium Subscribers in his plans.

No registration
Premium Subscribers have a special copy of their kalmstrom.com Solution, with the Premium organization logotype on the major forms. We return their confidence by making the Premium copy register free, so VIP Subscribers do not have to hassle with registration keys.

Worth the extra cost?
The Minimum and Medium subscriptions give good value for money, so we don’t recommend the Premium Subscription for all. If you have a small team managing incoming e-mails with Folder HelpDesk or HelpDesk OSP there is no need for a Premium Subscription.

But say that you are a big organization and have one hundred people reporting their time with TimeCard or booking resources with Calendar Browser – then we do recommend for you to consider the Premium alternative. It is there, among big companies and state and municipal authorities, we find the kalmstrom.com Premium Subscribers.

More info
Welcome to contact us if you have questions about VIP status and Premium Subscription. We will do our best to help you judge if it is the right alternative for your organization!

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

(This blog post was updated 4 March 2015)

kalmstrom.com Tip: Use CSS in SharePoint 2010

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a time saving invention when you work with websites. Most web designers want to use a limited number of fonts and colors on a site, and they also want all lists, heading types etc. to have the same look. Instead of adding the code for this on each page the info can be gathered in a CSS file. When a page has a link to that file, all formatting info in the CSS file will be applied to the page. Changes in the CSS file will apply to all pages that have the link, so with CSS it is easy to try out and change the formatting of a website.


Microsoft Certified SharePoint expert
CSS may also be used with SharePoint, but working with SharePoint is not exactly the same as working with web pages. Our kalmstrom.com CEO has earned all the available Microsoft Certifications for SharePoint 2010, so he knows how to do it. In the demo above he shows how to get started with CSS in SharePoint. This demo is also included in the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website.

Create the CSS file in SharePoint Designer
First Peter creates a CSS file in SharePoint Designer 2010, and since he wants to keep it very simple he just makes a change of the text color. When a link to that CSS file is added to the SharePoint homepage in addition to all the CSS files already uses by default, the custom styles is layered on top of what comes out of the box, and the text color is changed.

Add the CSS link in the browser
However, it is not possible to just add a link to the new CSS file in an ASPX page because SharePoint will not save it. Instead Peter explains how to edit a SharePoint web part in a web browser and add the link to the CSS file that way.

Expansion of SharePoint usage
Peter is fascinated by the endless possibilities of SharePoint 2010. For several years HelpDesk OSP has been one of the most popular kalmstrom.com products, and we also plan to add SharePoint as an alternative for sharing and storage in more applications. In the future kalmstrom.com will make a much stronger use of SharePoint than today, but I will come back to that in later articles.

Keep up with kalmstrom.com on Google+

To give everyone interested a possibility to keep up with the events of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions we offer several alternatives to follow us. Now we have added a kalmstrom.com Google+ page also.

Increasingly popular
According to Business Insider SAI Google+ gets more than 600 000 new users each day and has around 62 million registered users. Therefore it is of course important for kalmstrom.com to give Google+ users an easy way to see what happens in our company.

The kalmstrom.com Blog is the base
I blog several times a week, and I always mention product updates, new development projects and other that is directly connected to I also comment on important news in our business and how they affect our company.

Apart from these obvious subjects I like to tell about local customs, traditions and holidays in both Sweden and India ‒ in the latter case with the help of the kalmstrom.com team members in Indore, of course. And sometimes I just I want to share something that makes me happy or angry. I hope this mix makes the kalmstrom.com Blog varying and interesting to read. It is at least fun for me to write it!

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter
the kalmstrom.com software. kalmstrom.com has been represented in social media for around a year, but we have been more active during the autumn. On Facebook and Twitter we use company pages, but on LinkedIn we guide most business contacts to kalmstrom.com CEO Peter’s account even if we have a company page also.

‒ and now Google+
On Google+ we also use a kalmstrom.com company page, and of the medias mentioned above we find it most similar to Facebook. It will be interesting to see how this page develops.

Social media tracking
If you choose to follow kalmstrom.com Business Solution through one or more social media, you will get links to all blog posts. You will also get shorter comments, links to articles and other tidbits that are too short for a blog. However, you will have to click the blog links to read the whole articles and see the images.

Tweet   

Website sharing icons
In line with this elevated activity in social media we have added Like and Share icons similar those here in the blog to some of our web pages. Please, select the icon you prefer and help us spread the word about the kalmstrom.com software!

2012 - kalmstrom.com Invests In People And Products

First I want to wish all blog readers a prosperous, healthy and peaceful New Year. Then I will not say more today, as I will call upon our kalmstrom.com CEO, Peter, to inform you about his plans for the future:


I have just left Indore after a very successful and constructive visit. Of course I already knew that we have a talented Indian team, but it was a joy to meet them in person and once again re-confirm it.

kalmstrom.com goes cloudy
To better be able to meet future development requests, the kalmstrom.com team has taken on a task that will change the products profoundly. Current users will still recognize them, but the architecture will be considerably different. We see a future where teams continue to get more mobile and geographically dispersed, and therefore we want to re-build all of our applications for more web-based usage.


Helping users embrace the future
If we keep the current architecture and only add new features to our products, they will eventually become old-fashioned. We don't want to wait for that day to make the necessary changes, because then we will prevent Member organizations from meeting and embracing the future. Members of kalmstrom.com Community deserve better!


KBase pilot project
Our developers have started the new development path with the comparatively simple knowledgebase application KBase. We hope to soon be able to release version 3, which will have a fully mobile and touch-friendly web interface in addition to the Outlook interface.

Next step will be to rebuild PF HelpDesk, using what we have learned when developing KBase V3. The new technique will also mean that our products will support the 64-bit version of Office 2010.

SharePoint alternative
So far kalmstrom.com has mainly done client-side applications, but next year we intend to provide also server-side features and mobile applications that use the new SharePoint 2010 tools. For shared information store we also want to add SharePoint as an alternative to a database in Access or SQL.

Then users will be able to send their time reporting data directly to a SharePoint list from TimeCard or store meeting information in multiple calendar lists from Calendar Browser.

Windows 8
By the end of February we expect to see the first Beta version of Windows 8, and this is a fascinating challenge for kalmstrom.com. Judging from the pre-beta developer release there will be no significant compatibility problems for us. Instead we can right from the beginning start taking advantage of the benefits this new operating system will give, like the Metro interface and the integrated Windows Store.

More team members
For all this development we will need more staff, and during my visit to Indore I interviewed several promising applicants. We have already given an offer to another QA Engineer, and more will come.

Extended team for technical support
After having followed the support cases for several months kalmstrom.com developer Kanak is ready for a more active role, and from January she will take over the responsibility for the second line support. This will give our lead developer Jayant more time for planning and guidance of the new staff, but of course he will still be assisting if needed. To further improve the support our Office Manager Vipul will start helping Sigge with the first line. Beside his Master of Business Administration Vipul has a technical background, so that will work fine.

These are just some of the kalmstrom.com plans for 2012. I feel certain that it will be a thrilling and progressive year, and I hope you want to share it with us!
Peter Kalmstrom CEO, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Continuous Studies Crucial To kalmstrom.com Developers

When you work in a business that changes as fast as ours, you have to be eager to learn new things to keep up. The Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team are all highly educated and intelligent, but they need some help from the expert, our CEO Peter, to learn the most advanced parts of new IT technology. Therefore he takes the opportunity to lecture on subjects important to the future development of the kalmstrom.com Office add-ons now that he is visiting the team in Indore.


A joy for both parties
These teaching sessions have not only been useful but also a great joy for everyone. “I am so proud of my team”, said Peter yesterday evening. “I really loved teaching them today!”

That is a very good testimonial coming from Peter. He is a Microsoft certified Trainer, and in addition to his work as CEO and program designer at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions he lectures on Sweden’s most advanced IT courses. Therefore he is used to ‒ and spoiled with! ‒ having clever pupils.

Lead Developer Jayant counters with: “Peter is a great teacher. Today we learned many new things about the endless possibilities of SharePoint. I am looking forward for tomorrow’s class.”  In the image above you can also see the developers Kanak, Sunil and Vijayant. I asked Siret for a photo, so she slipped into the conference room to take some for me. But the team was disturbed an "kicked" her out again after a few shots. They wanted to continue the studies in peace!

SharePoint expansion
Yesterday Peter was talking about general SharePoint-functionality, tips and tricks as well as development opportunities for kalmstrom.com. Today he will go into some detail on how to start expanding our range of SharePoint products.

Here are Peter's own words:
"So far we have mainly done client-side applications, but we intend to provide also server-side features and mobile applications that use the new SharePoint 2010 tools. All of our applications rely on a shared information store. Usually that is a network file share with a database in Access or SQL, but we hope to add SharePoint as an alternate choice for all of our applications shortly.

Thus Members of kalmstrom.com Community will be able to send their time reporting data directly to a SharePoint list from TimeCard and store meeting information in multiple calendar lists from Calendar Browser. We also hope to merge the features of our two issue tracking applications, HelpDesk OSP and PF HelpDesk by adding more server-side functionality to HelpDesk OSP. "

Saturday studies
When Peter is not visiting the team still has common studies. Every other Saturday is working day in India, but the kalmstrom.com team normally use these days for studies. They meet at the office and go through a program Peter has prepared for them, and in the evening they often have dinner together, when also the non-technical staff join in.

These Saturdays are much appreciated by the team, and in the end all users of the kalmstrom.com software will benefit from them. A knowledgeable team that work well together can do much to improve the products, and Peter welcomes all suggestions from his team and listens carefully to their opinions. When everyone pulls in the right direction it will show in the result!

kalmstrom.com's First Year On Facebook

Yesterday it was one year since I created a page for kalmstrom.com Community on Facebook. It was something “everyone” did, but I actually did not know much about Facebook and had not used it earlier. Today it is interesting to see that the kalmstrom.com Community page fills an important function even though it has not developed in the direction I envisaged.

Expectations on exchange of ideas 
When I created the Facebook page I hoped it would be a place for discussions among Members of kalmstrom.com Community. We had then talked for a rather long time about creating a forum for users of the kalmstrom.com Office applications, but we never found the time for really doing it. Maybe the Facebook page could be something similar? I never dreamed about thousands of “fans”, but I hoped to get a reasonably steady group of contributors.



Not the Forum I had thought
I had pictured a page where Community Members and other interested parties would comment our Outlook add-ons, ask questions about features and usage and give suggestions on enhancements. But those discussions have stayed in support e-mails and online chats, between the kalmstrom.com staff and the individual Members. It has not at all found its way to the Facebook Community page.

More than the foreseen fan category
After only a few weeks the new kalmstrom.com Community page had 30 Facebook fans. They were of course the team members, and a number of enthusiastic Community Members liked the page at once. This was as expected, as well as the users who dropped in later. But we were also delighted to see that so many of our friends and relatives wanted to follow the doings of kalmstrom.com via Facebook. This was a nice surprise, because we work in a specialized niche and not everyone can understand what we really do.

Diversified group
Today the kalmstrom.com Facebook page has more than 50 fans, and they are a mixed company. One dominant group is of course users of our products, and another one is friends and relations to both the Swedish and the Indian team members. Then there are also a few people we don’t know, with whom we have had no other contact.

The fans are spread over the world, just like the kalmstrom.com software. 16 comes from Sweden, 14 from India and 10 from the US. We have also two fans in Russia and Malaysia and one in each of the countries Netherlands, Moldova, Finland, Poland, UK, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Estonia and Norway.

A different kind of meeting place
The kalmstrom.com Facebook fans like our entries and comment on them now and then in a few words, but they never actually bring something new into the discussion. It seems that following the kalmstrom.com page instead has been a convenient way to get information about what happens to the products and the team members and to learn when a new blog post is published and what it is about. Articles are often commented on at our Facebook page instead of here in the blog itself.

Keeping the Facebook page up to date is a quick and enjoyable task, and even though it did not turn out to be like I thought it would, it serves a purpose. We reach more people via Twitter and LinkedIn, but to kalmstrom.com clearly Facebook is the most social of the social media.

Raised Value For kalmstrom.com Products

In November 2009 kalmstrom.com BusinessSolutions introduced a subscription system for all more advanced products, which I wrote about in two blogs,8 November and 16 November. During these two years the kalmstrom.com software applications have been much improved. Generally speaking our development work follows three paths, even if they intermingle.

The first path is to make the kalmstrom.com Officeadd-ons compatible with new Microsoft technology. In 2009 most of our customers still used Windows XP or Vista, but Windows 7 was released during the autumn and the kalmstrom.com team updated the products to support the new operating system. At that time we had already updated the products for in Office 2007, and when Office 2010 came one year later we could take full advantage of the ribbon ‒ which brings us to the second path.

When new technology is introduced the kalmstrom.com developers don’t just ask themselves how to make our software compatible with it. Another very important question is to ask how to use the new technology to our advantage, to make the kalmstrom.com products better and easier to work with. That is the second development path: to continuously make the applications better. Here we have a big help from Community Members. They use our products on a daily basis and often give us suggestions to enhancements. We always listen, and if possible we realize the customer’s request.

The third path is for the long run, and it is the responsibility of our CEO and our Lead Developer. Peter and Jayant follow very closely what happens in our branch and among all interesting new technology they try to select the most suitable to build on for a strong future. 

During the two years of kalmstrom.com Community we have not raised our Community fees, but now we feel it is time to do so. Old monthly subscribers who don’t break the subscription will still pay the old fees, but yearly subscribers and all new Community Members will have to pay a bit more.

We will use the extra revenues to hire more developers and another QA Engineer. This way the development work can advance faster, and I am sure both old and new Community Members will appreciate the improvements during the next two years of kalmstrom.com Community.

MS Business Intelligence Silver Partnership Coming Together For kalmstrom.com

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has earlier earned a Microsoft Silver Competency as Independent Software Vendor, but we are not the ones to sit and rest on our laurels. Instead we aim for more recognition, and as the testing of our products gave enough credit for the Business Intelligence Competency also, it was the most natural next step.

To get the Business Intelligence Silver Competency we needed a few more customer references and certifications, and now I am proud to announce that we have conquered that obstacle also. Helpful Community Members have given us recommendations with the special information about their use of the kalmstrom.com Office add-ons that Microsoft wants, and I have passed two assessments: Microsoft Sales and Marketing and Microsoft Licensing Online. This means that the kalmstrom.com will soon have two Silver Competencies and an even stronger position on the marketplace.

Gartner analyze recommends subscription model like that of kalmstrom.com

Gartner, Inc. claims to be the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Today I read one of the Gartner reports, and since it was about subscription models I found it very interesting.

What is a subscription?
Gartner defines a subscription business model as a model where a product or service is paid for on a continuous, periodic basis. The model gives the customer ongoing access to the product/service for the life of the subscription agreement. Gartner also remarks that the model fosters a degree of customer experience or customer loyalty that is unique and different from what you get with a purchased product.

kalmstrom.com Community ‒ the right decision
This month I have written two blog posts about the kalmstrom.com subscription model, one about the two year anniversary for kalmstrom.com Community and another one about the statistics of that duration. In both posts I could conclude that transferring to a subscription payment model was a good decision, and now Gartner has come to the same conclusion about subscriptions in general.

Expanding payment model
Gartner predicts a strong increase of the "subscription economy". Especially companies who provide products that can be delivered electronically or digitally should consider this alternative. Gartner recommends businesses who are not offering subscriptions yet to put a priority on assessing this alternative now, to not miss the opportunity.

Subscription models raise new concerns
The kalmstrom.com team has long ago learned that the subscription payment model brings some new factors into the customer relations, and Gartner also points out that the subscription business models raise new concerns regarding managing subscriptions and subscribers. To kalmstrom.com this closer relationship to the user organizations is nearly always something positive. We were aware that the relation would change when introducing the Community, and we looked forward to it.

kalmstrom.com on the right track
As I said in the earlier blog posts we are very satisfied with our transfer to a subscription model, but of course it feels good to know that world leading analysts recommend others to do just what kalmstrom.com has already done. We are also happy about all Community Members who understand and appreciate the benefits of subscribing to kalmstrom.com Office applications instead of buying them.

Connect To kalmstrom.com On LinkedIn

For a rather long time I have not done much about my representation on LinkedIn, but now I have decided to use it as an alternative to Facebook and Twitter. Many in my branch prefer the more professionally aimed LinkedIn to other social media, and I have therefore updated my LinkedIn account with much more info than before.

kalmstrom.com Blog
To make the kalmstrom.com Blog easier to follow for my LinkedIn contacts I have connected it to LinkedIn. This way all my contacts can see our latest posts on their LinkedIn homepage. The blog is the best way to follow what happens to the kalmstrom.com products, and we also give comments on other activities in the branch or near the kalmstrom.com team members.

kalmstrom.com products
Kate has updated the LinkedIn information about kalmstrom.com Business Solutions and also added some of our products. As they are new on LinkedIn we have not yet received any recommendations on them, but I am sure they will come.

Connect
I have sent connect invitations to some Community Member who were suggested to me, but please don’t wait if you did not receive one yet. Connect to me instead! I will be happy to say yes.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

OLAP Reporting Tool Gives Community Statistics

Last week kalmstrom.com Community celebrated 2 years, and we have now looked at the statistics a bit, of course using our own applicationOLAP Reporting Tool. Here are some interesting facts and changes.

How many products?
Community Members are entitled to use the kalmstrom.com applications freely, without any extra costs for additional products. This is obviously not the feature that dips the scales in our favor, though, because ever since the start most of the Community Members have been using only one of the kalmstrom.com products.

The main selling point when choosing kalmstrom. com is something else. Organizations search for a product that fits their needs, and when they discover the kalmstrom.com solution they find it worth the money regardless of the possibility to have more. Today 87 % of the Community Members are using one product, 8 % are using two and only 5 % are using three products. Nevertheless we will keep that option open to all our current and future Members.

What products?
PF HelpDesk has been the kalmstrom.com flagship for many years, and this tool for issue tracking within Outlook is still the most popular one. After it TimeCard for Outlook and HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint has approximately the same number of user organizations. Calendar Browser is used by only 10 % of the Community Members, but during the last few months we have had two new Premium Members on our resource booking application for Outlook. As we also see an increasing interest in evaluating Calendar Browser, we believe it will have a higher user percentage next year.

Who are the Community Members?
All kinds of organizations have joined kalmstrom.com Community, from small local businesses over public and governmental entities to large worldwide companies. It is fascinating to see how the percentage of Members from outside Europe and USA has grown during the two years of kalmstrom.com Community. From 8 % after 6 months the figure has now risen to 22 %.

We still get most new Community Members from Western Europe and the US, but we are excited about the kalmstrom.com expansion in other parts of the world. The fact that they know about and trust kalmstrom.com Business Solutions in New Zeeland, Australia and Canada is no surprise, but we now also have Members in South Africa, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Greenland and Barbados ‒ just to mention some of the new countries.

Discount to schools and charities
As both Sigge, Siret and I are former teachers it feels good to be able to give a 50 % discount on the Community fees to educational institutions. The kalmstrom.com products are especially popular among universities. We also grant this discount to charities, and we hope it will give them a possibility to do a bit more good with the money they else would have paid for software ‒ or give them the possibility to work more efficiently with software they could not afford at all without the discount. The percentage of schools and charities has been relatively stable at around 18 % all the time during the two years since we launched kalmstrom.com Community.

Promising future for kalmstrom.com Community
Looking back gives knowledge and inspiration, but mostly the kalmstrom.com team is looking forward instead. We study the development in our branch, carefully choose our battles and select the challenges that might be useful to overcome or sidestep. The future for kalmstrom.com Community looks bright, and next blog will probably be about future plans or new releases again.

Peter Kalmstrom, SharePoint Expert, Software Developer and Professor

The kalmstrom.com CEO is a true renaissance man. Peter is not only a skilled software developer with expert, Microsoft certified knowledge of Office and SharePoint, but he is also a good professor. He likes to teach, and therefore he has chosen to conduct a number of advanced courses for IT professionals.

SharePoint development

Last week Peter had a‎ 5-day SharePoint-course for developers on the subject of  Developing Solutions with SharePoint 2010. The course gives an overview of all the different kinds of SharePoint development. Both server-side and client-side data access methods are covered, and the attendees get a chance to try as well Silverlight as Java script and .NET coding against SharePoint.

SharePoint a flexible tool

Lately Peter has held no less than four different whole-week courses, covering SharePoint from the developer, administrator, power user and designer/

webmaster perspectives.

Peter finds SharePoint an extremely wide platform, with an immense potential for building applications, collaborating and managing documents. By teaching Peter can let others share his knowledge about all of these things.

Rewarding task

Peter himself also learns a lot from the attendees on his courses. They come from large Swedish organizations and consulting agencies and possess experiences that Peter is interested in learning from. He brings his new knowledge to the kalmstrom.com team and lets it influence his decisions, and that way Peter's teaching sessions in the end also benefit kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

kalmstrom.com Community - Satisfying Software Licensing For All

In the beginning of 2009, when kalmstrom.com Business Solutions had been selling software licenses for nine years, we experienced a growing feeling that we did something wrong. Our applications for Office, Exchange and SharePoint were fine, and our CEO Peter saw a great development potential in them. However, we saw problems with the payment model we used at that time: buy a license and then add a support contract if you wish to use the kalmstrom.com services after the first year.

Unknown users with traditional one-time payments
We sold a lot of licenses, and many of the customers continued to use our products and were known to us. But there was also a big, anonymous group out there who once had bought a license but whom we no longer had any contact with. Were they still using our product? What were they thinking about it? Was it helping them the way they had hoped when they bought the license? For whom were we actually developing our software?

Right to support and upgrades
Another issue was that all organizations were not prepared to pay for support and upgrades of their kalmstrom.com application. Instead they used old versions as long as possible to avoid the cost for a support contract. It did not feel satisfying to know that users were not having the best possible versions of their kalmstrom.com product, but we found it difficult to give free support and upgrades without finding a source of income to finance it.

The Community model
After many discussions within the team we decided to transfer to a subscription system for the use of our products. We would create a Community of user organizations, and Members of that Community would always get support and free upgrades. That way we could make sure that users of software from kalmstrom.com really had got the very best we could offer. Community Members would also have the right to unlimited use of all kalmstrom.com products. More users and products would create a stronger bond between kalmstrom.com and the Community Members, and that was exactly what we wanted to achieve.

The crucial question
Finally, in November 2009, we took the big step. We all felt certain that the Community model would be better for all parties in the long run, but it was still not an easy decision. Would customers be prepared to pay month after month or year after year for the right to use a kalmstrom.com product?

Peter, the creator of the applications, had confidence in their value to the users. But Sigge and I were worried that we would lose customers. And we did lose some ‒ old customers who did not want to transfer to the subscription system and potential new ones who only wanted to make a one-time payment. But we got other customers instead, customers who appreciate the security they get as Members of kalmstrom.com Community.

Improved customer relations
Today, after two years, we are happy we made the transfer. We have a solid base of Community Members, and that means we feel strong when planning for the future ‒ ours and theirs. Now we cooperate with the users in a much better way, because with the Community Members there are never any discussions about support contracts or the right to upgrade.

Instead we all work together towards a common goal: to solve problems and constantly enhance the kalmstrom.com Microsoft add-ons so that they even better meet the requirements from the Community Members. We say a warm thank you to all who have shown trust and faith in the kalmstrom.com team and in our products by joining kalmstrom.com Community!